rEFInd on macbook 5,1 and Booting USB recovery

[Nicholas Dexter]

Hi,

I'm using a macbook 5,1 late 2008 unibody with rEFInd 0.11.2 so that I can boot either OS X 10.11.6 or Windows 7. I have windows 7 on the same SSD in a different partition.

I activted windows 7 and now my windows will not boot. I need to run the recovery USB i have so I can repair windows but rEFInd has an error when I select the usb:

Any idea how to get around this error? Thanks !!

[Roderick W. Smith]

rEFInd is trying to boot a program called memtest.efi, which is not a valid loader. There are various programs called memtest.efi, but none of them would launch Windows (unless you renamed the standard Windows boot loader to memtest.efi). It's conceivable that this program is located somewhere (like EFI\Microsoft\Boot) that's caused rEFInd to show it with a Windows icon, but that's a quirk in the layout of the USB disk, not a rEFInd bug. You might want to check the recovery disk manually -- look for other files with names that end in .efi, and if you find something, try to locate it in the rEFInd menu; or launch it via an EFI shell rather than via rEFInd. Normally, USB drives are booted via a file called EFI\BOOT\bootx64.efi (or a variant of that for ARM or i386 platforms), which rEFInd identifies as the "fallback boot loader." Try launching that, if it's present on your USB disk.